Stronghold

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Raise an army and defend your keep in MacSoft's castle sim.

By Rick Sanchez

When it comes to real-time strategy games, there's always something fun about setting up your town for strategic purposes. Sticking your defenses in the right spots for maximum meat grinder effect is always a delight. Watching enemies run their sorry selves into the meat grinder is also a satisfying feeling, so its natural that a game built around creating the best defenses possible to hold off masses of troops is a fun and exciting challenge. Mix this in with a medieval setting, which tends to hold a lot of people's interest, and you've got Stronghold, the new castle defense RTS from Firefly Studios. And aside from some interface and control issues centered around the actual building of your castle walls, this is a fun and exciting entry into the RTS market that many of you should really be able to make love to. That's right, I said make love to. So I'm a pervert, what do you want from me?

Right out of the box, there's plenty to do. There's campaigns for both the military and economic sides of the game and extra scenarios for both as well. The military campaign centers on an actual story unlike the rest of the scenarios, however. You are the son of a slain lord that died at the hands of some treacherous scumbags that tricked him Braveheart style into a peace meeting where he and his guards were slaughtered. This opened the kingdom up for invasion and it was quickly taken and divided into four shares by the four tyrants taking part in the action. Throughout the course of the campaign, you'll need to build your forces and slowly take the counties rightfully yours back from those that stole them. The economic campaign is much shorter and not really held together by much in particular. But then, the military campaign has plenty of economic objectives as well so you won't feel that this side of the game was left out. But if you're looking for purely military fun, there's plenty of that as well with sieges where all you need is to defend and keep your lord alive and well, or turn the tables, attack, and raze the castle to the ground.

Each game starts with either an existing castle that you need to repair and upgrade for defense, or a blank map where you have to build, from scratch, your town and castle into a hustling and bustling city that can support itself. And all the while you'll be subject to attacks, which is really the main point of the game. In order to get your castle in working order, you'll have to build your infrastructure up just like in any other strategy game with a economic model. You'll need to chop trees for wood, mine stone and metal, and have plenty of food production going. Once you've got things set up well enough to satisfy your citizens, you need to start making weapons and constructing walls to hold back the troops intent on destroying you.

And this was one of the problems I had with the game. It's fair to say that this is a major part of the game, and therefore should be as easy as possible. Unfortunately this wasn't the case for me at first. Initial building is usually easy as pie and setting buildings is fine as long as you plan in advance... it's the walls that are really the problem. The way the game is set up as an isometric view (which can be rotated to four different camera angles) leaves you wondering how to place certain sections of the wall which can be hidden at all angles. If you can't find a way to close the gap, or just miss the gap completely, the enemy will have no problem getting into your castle, killing a whole lot of people, and wrecking a bunch of your buildings. This seemed like a really strange thing to me, because they actually included a feature that allows you to lower all of the buildings, trees and walls so you can peek behind them to see hidden units, but there is no way to give commands or build while you do this. The section only lasts as long as you hold the right mouse button down and no longer. Then I found out, though I still can't find it in the manual, that there is a permanent lowering feature (much like they have in The Sims) for building. Press the spacebar for this to happen (thanks CH). It's a big thing to miss and certainly degrades the entertainment value if you don't know. Maybe I'm just blind...

The other thing you have to be very wary of is building your walls too close to where the enemy enters the map. There were problems with people taking advantage of this in the beta (by building walls right next to the spawn area and setting archers there to pick guys off when they appear), so it was fixed by making any walls within the radius around the spawn point automatically dissapear when the enemy troops appear. This was a pretty huge confusion to me for a while as the radius is actually pretty large. Sections of my walls were completely disappearing without returning any resources before I decided to move my walls back and realized what was going on. It certainly kept me from sticking walls too close to the spawn points, but a nice visible radius would have been nice so that I could see where the edge of my buildable land was.

Actual design of your castle and use of the natural terrain as defense is vital to building a successful castle. If you can work it, you may be able to herd troops into a certain area filled with traps and archers just waiting to massacre the enemy. You'll have several different pieces available for building your castle including towers for archers, turrets for trebuchets, and walls for units to move from place to place quickly. You'll need to decide where your resources are most needed for the walls and towers, as they aren't exactly cheap, and then expand on them later. Initial placement is vital for fending off early attacks to give you time to recover and rebuild afterwards.

Once you have everything set up, and sometimes before, you'll be attacked by groups of troops ranging from weak to incredibly strong and numerous. Then the world turns to chaos. And this particular kind of chaos is a whole lot of fun. Before you know it, catapults will be breaking down your walls, spearmen and swordmen will be rushing your castle trying to tear down your walls and fill in your moats while archers and crossbows fire volleys of projectiles at your men. You have the natural advantage in your elevated position with towers and castle walls, but you'll have to use a whole lot of strategy when placing troops, picking vital targets, and knowing when to sally forth from the castle in a rally to rout the remaining troops.

You'll have plenty of weapons at your disposal and all of them will be familiar to those that have studied medieval warfare or even watched Braveheart, Excalibur, or the sadly craptastic The Messenger too many times. They've got all of the good stuff here including death trap pits, catapults, crossbowmen, cavalry, archers, battering rams, boiling oil, flying cows of death, and farts in their general direction. You'll need to do a lot of adjusting of troop placement once you begin to see how the enemy will go about sieging the castle, thus making sure your troops can get from place to place quickly without opening up the entire castle to rapage is very important. Having sections of the city that can fall without losing the whole thing is pretty key in huge attacks, because you will lose huge sections of the city. This is not an easy game. Well, it is on easy, but even at normal, it gets significantly more difficult with limited funds and tougher opponents.

One of the most interesting parts of the game is deciding what can be left outside and what needs to be hidden on the inside of your fortress. Ideally, you'd like to have every building you own behind walls, but that just isn't possible in most cases. Building that big a wall is unrealistic and inefficient. Taking risks by building farther from the castle is a part of the game and one you'll have to think on carefully. But at the same time, I have a bit of a gripe about this. It seems like enemies kill buildings too fast. There are times when three units can wander in and wipe out your entire crop of apple orchards in a minute before you can get anyone there to stop them. I don't mind that the enemy is out there destroying my stuff, cause that would probably happen, but the balancing just seems a bit off.

Other than that, I found AI to be pretty solid. There was a bit of train action going on with units on the move, but friendly AI was actually pretty decent about which targets should get a higher priority. Enemy AI also was pretty good about spreading their attacks around so that concentrated defense was close to impossible unless you managed to find a way to make them come a certain way.

Even with the building annoyances and minor balancing issues, I really have loved playing it. After I master the game enough finally finish the last couple of campaign missions, I'll be more ready than I have been to jump into the heated mulitplayer that has some really great potential. There's a lot of game here and fans of the RTS genre should seriously consider taking this one off of store shelves. It won't be a disappointment.

-- Dan Adams

About the Macintosh version The port by MacSoft is an outstanding product. The game is carbonized and it runs great under both OS X and OS 9 or 8.6. The game actually has surprisingly moderate minimum requirements and runs quite well on a 400 MHz G3 or better. On my iBook, I don't really notice any slowdown until there are close to 40 or 50 units moving around on screen. On my G4 733, once you reach the 100 unit level things start to get a little pokey. The game does run a bit faster under OS 9 than under OS X, but it won't make much of a difference unless you're running on a system lower than a G4 400.

7PresentationThe manual is useful if not flashy (although I still can't find that spacebar command) and the menu system is easy enough to navigate.

8GraphicsAnimations are a bit choppy, but there are enough of them to keep you entertained. This isn't the prettiest game ever by a longshot, but it's good enough that your eyes won't burn.

8SoundSound was pretty decent. Charging troops let out battlecries and everything has a sound to it. The music gets a little old but its all solid.

8.5GameplayThis game's a whole lot of fun. Balancing seems a little off to me, but overall a very strategy filled and enjoyable experience.

8.5Lasting AppealThere's a lot to play in this with the military campaign, military battles from both defensive and offensive sides, economic scenarios, and mulitplayer. You should be playing this for a while.